What does "MESA drivers" refer to here? I'm guessing it's not GPU drivers from https://mesa3d.org/

No those don’t work in most cloud VMs but MESA provides llvmpipe/softpipe implementations for Vulkan, OpenGL, etc. They’re software renders so relatively slow but work in headless VMs like Claude Code for web environments.

Photogrammetry has been around for a long time now. It uses pretty much the same inputs to create meshes from a collection of images of a scene.

It works well for what it does. But, it's mostly only effective for opaque, diffuse, solid surfaces. It can't handle transparency, reflection or "fuzz". Capturing material response is possible, but requires expensive setups.

A scene like this poodle https://superspl.at/view?id=6d4b84d3 or this bee https://superspl.at/view?id=cf6ac78e would be pretty much impossible with photogrammetry and very difficult with manual, traditional, polygon workflows. Those are not videos. Spin them around.

The field is advancing rapidly. New research papers are being published daily for a few years now. The best news feed I've found on the topic is

https://radiancefields.com/

https://x.com/RadianceFields alt: https://xcancel.com/RadianceFields

“Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.”

— Richard Guindon

This is certainly true of writing software.

That said, I am assuredly enjoying trying out artificial writing and research assistants.

Go make a game for the Sega Genesis https://mdengine.dev/

Or, the GameBoy Advance https://github.com/GValiente/butano

I was seriously looking into the GameBoy Advance, but the real hardware has gotten quite expensive these days.

I wonder how the latest and greatest Wonderswan is doing in terms of price.

One uses emulator while developing anyways. Try with C64 and VICE and join us at https://csdb.dk/

> One uses emulator while developing anyways.

Yes, but part of the joy is the anticipation of playing on a real device at the end.

> Try with C64 and VICE and join us at https://csdb.dk/

Thanks for the invitation! I used a C64 as my only computer in the late 1990s long past its prime, because my mother got a really good deal on a whole set with printer and disk drives and plenty of disks with software (mostly games, from magazines). However, I was still a bit annoyed by the limitations of the system. I guess, if I had had a forth disk, I might have felt different.

In any case, for personal reasons I don't want to explore the C64 more.

But I never had a GameBoy Advance nor a Wonderswan.

Or an alternative for the Sega Genesis https://github.com/Stephane-D/SGDK

Or the Super Nintendo Entertainment System https://github.com/alekmaul/pvsneslib

Or the Gameboy / GBC, Sega Master System, Gamegear, Nintendo Entertainment System https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020

Or the TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine, Nintendo Entertainment System (alt), Commodore 64, Vic-20, Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Apple II/IIe, or Pet 2001 https://github.com/cc65/cc65

Or the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, Apple II (alt), Gameboy (alt), Sega Master System (alt), and Game Gear (alt) https://github.com/z88dk/z88dk

Or the Fairchild Channel F https://channelf.se/veswiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Note: Some are slightly pre-1999 (all these, I have at least successfully made a "Hello World" with)

----------------

If they're really wanting 1999, that's the 5th to 6th generation console range with Sega Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Dreamcast. (on these, only recommendations, no successful compiled software)

Playstation is really challenging and remains so even in 2026. Lots of Modchip and disk swap issues on real hardware. Possibilities: https://www.psx.dev/getting-started and https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK

N64 is less horrible, and there's quite a few resources: https://github.com/DragonMinded/libdragon and https://github.com/command-tab/awesome-n64-development

Sega Saturn is still pretty difficult. However, there is: https://github.com/yaul-org/libyaul?tab=readme-ov-file and https://github.com/ReyeMe/SaturnRingLib plus the old development kits from the 90's are still around https://techdocs.exodusemulator.com/Console/SegaSaturn/Softw...

Dreamcast is similar to the Saturn situation, yet strangely, a little better. There's https://github.com/dreamsdk/dreamsdk/releases and https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS along with the official SDKs that are still around https://www.sega-dreamcast-info-games-preservation.com/en/re...

I’ve heard of people doing ambient performance profiling by instrumenting their code to insert clicks into an audio buffer based on a high precision clock and piping it out a speaker. You get to learn the sound of your code at 44.1KHz

This might be the most absurdly terrific thing I’ve read in a while - like a profiler equivalent of a Geiger counter.

We did something like that for a hiring project once:

https://github.com/tonarino/acoustic_profiler

*vibe coding sounds* "3.6 roentgen. not great, not terrible"

This is similar to the approach touted by Steve Yegge in this interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw

I really appreciate that he is up-front about "Yes. Vibe coding has lots of dangerous problems that you must learn to control if you are to go whole-hog like this."

Has anyone read his Vibe Coding book? The Amazon reviews make it sound like it's heavy on inspiration but light on techniques.

Lots of good stuff in /newest gets missed. So, HN has an algo that selects some posts for a second chance. Looks like your post was selected for resurrection.

Back in the days of the PS2, you’d just take a couple of long triangle strips, give them a twist or two, then UV-animate a static texture up through them.

I recently appreciated this vid explaining that 3D translation using the traditional 4x4 transform matrix is performing a shear operation in 4D.

https://youtu.be/x1F4eFN_cos